'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Why I’ve Had Enough of George Orwell. By BEN JUDAH

Why is it always Orwell o’clock? Why is everything mildly unpleasant about
government instantly Orwellian? Why is every banal propaganda effort
obviously 1984 sprung to life? Why is it all as crushingly
predictable as the Orwell Prize, the outstandingly foreseeable new Churchill
And Orwell double biography, and now a new life-size bronze Orwell
statue outside the BBC?

There is a simplicity
and a clarity to Orwell’s prose. It flows nicely. But there is also nothing
special about it other than the fact it has been canonised as the ultimate in
English authorial excellence.

This is still very
much a surprise to me, because there is just so much wrong with it. Are the
violent caricatures of Jews in Down And Out In Paris And London really
defending the downtrodden in 1933? Are the rantings (against amongst others,
vegetarians) in The Road To Wigan Pier even coherent? Were the
baying hysterical yellow people forcing a European into Shooting An
Elephant really an appropriate metaphor for colonialism in 1936? Is
Julia, the paper-thin vamp in 1984,really a character at all?

Stranger, too, is the
idea that George Orwell was a master of prophecy. And this is not merely a
matter of a few false calls. Orwell was a man wholly addicted to tub-thumping
socialist augury. The gentleman non-pseudonymously known as Eric Blair
categorically announced in 1937 that “the upper-middle class is clearly
finished.” He predicted in 1941 alone that: the British Empire would be
converted into “a socialist federation of states”; the London Stock Exchange
would imminently be “torn down”; Britain’s country homes would be transformed
into socialist “children’s camps”; and Eton and Harrow faced immediate post-war
closure. He was making claims that were childish even for his time. This
addiction to announcing the future is why even his oft-quoted and more often
imitated 1941 essay England, Your England reads much more like
a strange sermon from his own parallel universe belonging to British socialist
totalitarians than anything genuinely reflective.

But none of Orwell’s
silly predictions would really irritate if the canonisation of 1984 was
not a net negative for our political debate. This is not to say the novel
is not a decent evocation of Stalinism—it is. It’s just that its lodging itself
as the English language’s only universally-read dystopia hampers awareness of
what really threatens democracy today. It strikes me as rather glib to say
that 1984 is relevant because Orwell was worried about surveillance
and “newspeak” words losing their meaning. Orwell’s actual warnings—about
homogenization, the destruction of information, a world without wealth and only
unlimited powers of the state—are now miles away. If anything, the threats to
democracy are the opposite of “Orwellian.”

This is the problem of
bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social
fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable
corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few.
Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the
totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic
state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is
unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.

Orwell was no
visionary when it comes to economics, either. Recall his Floating Fortresses
in 1984, explicitly designed to eat up the surplus production of a
population. His inability to meaningfully reflect on the dynamics of capitalism
(beyond moralising condemnation), let alone imagine a consumer society, is a
fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from the postwar era. It is a reminder
of how utterly written-off by European intellectuals the market economy was
immediately after the war - and what a shock the 1950s consumerist takeoff in
living standards proved to be.

Most of the Orwell cult only irritates, but one
thing legitimately grates: the idea of Eric Blair as a monument to British
decency... read more: